


lingers like smoke

by QueenOfTheWesternSky



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Post BoFA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 07:55:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3112064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfTheWesternSky/pseuds/QueenOfTheWesternSky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the lingering aftermath of the battle, Tauriel mourns the homeland she cannot return to, the friend she will never again lay eyes upon and the dwarvish prince she didn't know she loved until far too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lingers like smoke

_Because it was real._

These are the words that haunt Tauriel in the days following the battle. All throughout Middle Earth they are calling it the “Battle Of Five Armies”, an oddly grand name for a battle that was anything but. Surely, it was large in scale, in will and forces and of course stakes. But there was nothing _grand_ about it. Not a single soul who walked away from that battle will think of it as something of legend, something grand and important and brave.

Tauriel has been in many battles, but none so large in scale. She has never seen destruction affect so many people, never before, not once in her six hundred years has she witnessed so intimately what war could do to someone. To anyone, really, because the dwarves are mourning the loss of their King Under The Mountain, and his heirs, the elves mourn not only those that were lost on the battlefield but those at home—the elves in Mirkwood who will fall so deeply into their grief that they will waste away, and the humans mourn _everything_ they have ever known.

She too mourns, a great deal many things. She mourns the home that is now eternally out of reach, the Mirkwood from which, until meeting the Company of Thorin Oakenshield, she had never left, and she mourns the life she had there. She mourns her closest friend and confidant who seems to have slipped away amongst the chaos of the battle’s aftermath. She wonders if he will ever return to Mirkwood, she wonders if perhaps Thranduil has lost both his son and the closest thing he shall ever have to a daughter in one fell swoop. She feels more for his loss than she should.

But, strongest of all, she mourns the death of a dwarvish prince.

The remaining members of the company mourn the loss of the sons of Durin, Kili included, but beyond them, few seem to care about Kili or his brother, only concerned with the loss of Thorin Oakenshield, the dwarf who reclaimed Erebor, the King Under The Mountain. In passing, she hears whispers of how _sad_ it is that both Thorin’s heirs died in the battle, but Kili and Fili’s deaths are spoken of as more of an inconvenience than anything else.

Whispers follow her wherever she goes, because as the dust clears and the rivers of blood stop their flow, she realises she has nowhere to go. She cannot return to Mirkwood, her king would surely punish her greatly, this time not being so kind as to let her simply walk away from what he viewed as treason ( Sometimes, she thinks he may have been right about that, and yet she cannot find it within herself to regret the decisions that led her to the Lonely Mountain ). She cannot follow Legolas, as she often has, for he has vanished into the smoke and piles of corpses, and she knows that she has laid her eyes upon him for the last time. So she stays, she helps the dwarves. An older member of the company, Balin, is especially kind to her, he quiets others when they question the presence of a she-elf among the dwarvish masses.

Tauriel finds herself with questions that she know cannot be answered, and she finds herself wondering how so quickly, her life may have come undone. ( A long life, she has been told, by the children of the human man, Bard, who had stared at her in a mix of shock and awe as she explained that she was six centuries old—and still considered young. After she had said as much, Kili had been quite embarrassed to admit a mere seventy seven years of life. )

Once the battlefield has been cleared of the dead, dwarf, human, elf and orc alike, she finds she cannot remain, but is asked to once again by Balin.

“The morning after tomorrow, the sons of Durin will be laid to rest in the Hall of Kings below Erebor.” He explained, a tinge of sadness present in the rather constant smile on his face. “I feel that perhaps Kili might appreciate your presence, if you might find it in your heart to remain amongst us for a while longer.”

She doesn’t cry, but she wants to. She wants to weep, and feels that if she did, he is one of the only people left alive that would not judge her for it. But she refrains. She contains her emotions as she ought to, gives a curt nod of her head and replies as she must; telling him it would be an honour to be allowed to attend.

The ceremony itself is solemn and as she approaches the prince’s body, she can see a shining river stone peeking out from between his fingers, from where his hands are neatly folded atop his body. She cannot be sure, but she thinks perhaps Balin sees as she takes the stone from between his fingers, a decision she cannot fully rationalise.

She learns quickly that dwarvish funerals are unlike elvish ones. Elvish funerals are solemn, quiet events, they are cold and silent and she has always hated them, but has lost too many men to claim to be a stranger to them in the slightest. Dwarves seem determined to _celebrate_ the life of the one lost, and there’s something about that she admires, much in the way she found a strange kind of amusement from Kili telling her terrible jokes in dark moments, when most others would have remained silent.

That evening, she begins to feel it. She feels a sadness creeping into her bones, weighing her down in a way she, so light of foot, has never experienced before. Tauriel has never seen firsthand what grief can do to an elf, how it can destroy them—rot them away from the inside out, and leave them dead, or perhaps even worse, like her lord Thranduil ( She wonders sometimes what he might have been like before he lost his One, she wonders if he might have been more kind, she wonders that if perhaps this queen she has never met never died, that maybe Legolas might have not become so cold ). She knows now that she will, with the stone clutched in her palm, fingers closed around cool stone like a lifeline, a reminder of what she must do first, and she leaves before the sun has set over the mountain.

She has never travelled to the Blue Mountains, until recently, the world had existed only in Mirkwood, and she would look out beyond her home and wonder. ( When she told Kili that despite having over five centuries of life on him, that she had seen so little, he had begun to tell her stories of places he had been, sights he had seen, now she wishes she had told him how grateful she was. Those were sights she would never see in person, but she had shared in his memories, and that had been enough. )

The she-elf knows that she has little time in which to reach the mountains, for all the dwarves are beginning to trek to Erebor, their reclaimed homeland, and Tauriel knows if she does not do this now, then she never will. She heard whispers of such while in the Lonely Mountain, at least until the moment she was seen—then all chatter would cease immediately, or turn to her; why she was there, why she had not returned to Mirkwood with the other elves, and so very many rumours about her connection to the youngest prince.

She is a strange sight, travelling alone, especially now in which all the elves seem determined to close rank entirely, to protect their own. But she continues on her trek west, and endures the stares of every man, woman and dwarf that stops to stare at the fire haired she-elf so very far from home. Many of them have probably never seen an elf in person—she is grateful for this, they cannot tell how worn down she is, they cannot tell how grief has already began to eat away at her, and she _hates_ love. She hates that it has taken root so deeply within her, and she hates that because of what she is, she will only ever love _once._ And she did, perhaps she was simply unlucky in who her heart chose, or maybe it was simply the wrong place and the wrong time, but it was _real._

She knows this only because of the pain—it simply could not hurt so much, so deeply, if it hadn’t been real.

She reaches the Blue Mountains and many have already begun the long and hard journey to Erebor, but not _her._ Finding the woman is easy enough—she merely has to ask. Even in exile, a princess, a daughter of Durin, cannot be unknown. Tauriel has little idea what to expect when she faces this woman, but she is stern—far shorter than Tauriel herself, not even tall by dwarvish standards, but remains a commanding presence. As she opens the door, Tauriel finds herself bowing to the woman she knows to be the Lady Dis, who seems intrigued if nothing else by the sudden presence of a Mirkwood elf on her doorstep.

“Am I addressing the Lady Dis?” Tauriel inquires, and for a moment, she receives no response. The dwarf merely stares her down, but the she-elf _knows_ this woman to be whom she seeks—there is something in her eyes that she recognises, something she saw in Kili, and the resemblance both to the prince for whom she had come all this way and to the King Under The Mountain was so striking, it was almost like speaking to a ghost.

“You are. An’ just who exactly are you?”

“—My name is Tauriel, I am—I was the Captain of the Guard in Mirkwood.” An introduction that had so recently become a lie, words she stumbles over because she no longer knows how to define herself without the place from whence she came, and for a moment, she wonders if Dis can see the way her hand trembles at her side. “I come from Erebor, milady, from the battle.”

The bearded woman’s eyes narrow at the elf, and there is a split second in which Tauriel is entirely certain that she is going to have the door slammed in her face—instead, the woman steps aside, allowing the elf entry to her home. Tauriel does her best not to look at the walls—images of family, of the line of Durin, of a rather eager looking young dwarf that hasn’t quite grown into his jawline or grown anything close to a beard yet, but who she knows will. There is something unfathomably sad about looking at these portraits and knowing that so many of them have no future.

“I was not aware that the dwarves had maintained alliances with Mirkwood.” The woman goes on, gesturing to a chair that is entirely too small for someone of Tauriel’s height—but she sits anyway.

“They have not. But I am not here on behalf of the elves, or on behalf of Mirkwood.” She swallows and the words want to die in her throat, she wants to flee this place and never return, she wants her death to be quick, and she wants the ache in her chest to vanish as it ought to have done when the one it was felt for had _died_ in front of her. “I’m here about your son—Kili.”

“If you’ve come to tell me that my son is gone, I’m afraid you’re too late.”

“No, it’s not that.” She continued cautiously, watching the woman’s face carefully for any signs of emotion—she seemed resigned to this fate, to being alone and without the family she had loved so dearly.

“Then I cannot imagine what it is that my son did that would bring a Mirkwood elf all the way here.”

She finds that she cannot explain exactly why she is here—not in words. How on earth could she ever possibly explain what it was that she had felt for Kili? How could she say those words without sounding like she had lost her mind? A she-elf in love with a dwarvish prince, it sounds like a story for children, something wild and interesting—but only in fiction, in reality, such a union could never happen, it _would_ never happen. But it had.

So instead of speaking, she holds out her hand, the river stone still resting in her palm for Dis to take. The look on the woman’s face says it all, and Tauriel knows there is little point in lying—knows that if ever there was proof of the love she so briefly shared with Kili, it was this stone and the promise inscribed within it. “He told me that you gave him this—that it was a promise to return.” There is a sad smile tugging at the edges of her lips, and her eyes begin to sting with tears that she cannot allow to fall. “He said you thought him reckless. I…I cannot return him to you, I cannot force his promise to be kept, but I know that he would want you to have this returned to you.”

The stone is taken from her hand, and slowly rolled over within Dis’s hands, her finger tips running over the inscription. “Were you with my sons when they died?”

Tauriel ducks her head, looking down to her lap where her hands are now folded neatly, a force of habit it seems she will never break. “I did not—I did not see what happened to Prince Fili, I only know he was slain in the battle. But I was with Kili when he passed.” A single hand lifts to her face, trying to rid herself of the tears that seem determined to stay.

“Was he brave? Did my son die bravely?”

She is holding her breath and every part of her being aches with the loss of him, and she does not want this love of hers. She does not want to love this dwarvish prince with his charming smile and bright eyes, with his witty words and his stubborn sense of loyalty that had never once wavered in her presence. She does not wish to love the dead. She does not wish to be in love.

“—he tried to avenge his brother. He…he saved my life, and a great deal many others. Kili was perhaps the bravest person I have ever known in all my six hundred years, and I am so very sorry for your loss.”

“And I am sorry for yours.” There is a kindness in her stern eyes that was not there before when she speaks, and the two of them sit in silence for a long while. If Dis sees the tears rolling down Tauriel’s pale cheeks, she does not say anything, and Tauriel is grateful.

It is soon after that her ending comes—it is welcomed. Though it remains that there is something unpleasant about the thought that she may never again be mentioned—or even thought of in passing. Will any of the Mirkwood elves even know she has passed on? Will Legolas ever think of her again? Will Thranduil one day look back on her banishment, and feel even the slightest pin pricks of regret? Will there ever be stories told of the foolish she-elf who made the mistake of falling in love with a dwarvish prince? Will their lives all be swallowed in the shadow of the King Under The Mountain, in the ashes of the desolation of Smaug?

Will anyone remember them, or their suffering, at all?

Tauriel has her doubts, but she likes to think that whether she is remembered or not, that whatever life lays beyond the fringes of this one is brighter, is one without battles or politics, she likes to think that it is a world in which no one will think twice of the elf and the dwarf in love.

She likes to think it is a world with Kili in it.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know, I wanted to write something about Kili & Tauriel, but I didn't have the guts to do anything AU. Soon, my friends, soon there will be an everyone lives happily ever after fic, I swear it.


End file.
